Independence Message

By Reverend Billy Talen · July 04, 2014

04

July 2014

The word INDEPENDENCE is a Mt. Rushmore word in the American language, up on the mountain with FREEDOM and RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI). Look at all the enemies climbing up our mountain: tornadoes, penicillin-resistant bacteria, Honduran children, dying Honey Bees. But I’m safe up here with my new app and Beyonce.

In the 50 years since Viet Nam, after we bombed, strafed and defoliated independence movements worldwide, INDEPENDENCE - the founding psychological profile of our citizenry, turned into its opposite. We take the lie into our bodies. We don’t have fire-works. We have extreme karmic unction: strokes, cancer, and malodorous gastric disaster.

The violence against independence movements of non-Americans is now inseparable from the war on the natural world. The powerless at the edges are harvested for the 1% at the center, whether its people or animals or ancient trees. Or Honey Bees.

July 4th isn’t a celebration for most people. It’s a warning that there are still many of us who are so insecure in our own independence that we see the independence of others as a deadly threat.